You Have to Spend Money to Make Money

You Have to Spend Money to Make Money:

Why This Investment in Your Career Will Take You to the Next Level

Your resume is your most important marketing tool. It reflects your accomplishments, your skills, and your personal brand. If done right, this is your golden ticket. If not, it is a one-way stop to the trashcan. Your resume is going to determine what jobs you will have, how much you will be getting compensated, where you will be employed, and what promotions you will be earning. You can be the most qualified candidate for the job, however, without a dynamic resume you will be passed over and left wondering why. You cannot afford to get this wrong. If you knew an outstanding resume could get you a better job and enhance your ability to negotiate a higher salary would you then decide to invest in yourself?

People tend to be very skeptic when it comes to hiring someone to write their resume. They think it costs too much or it isn’t anything they couldn’t do for themselves. Mostly, they are unaware of any faults in their own resume and don’t believe there is a real need to hire a professional. They don’t see any pain points and, therefore, brush it off as a waste of money.

A quote by David Osborne, President and Founder at Simmetry Solutions, sums it up best:

“The weaknesses that you're unaware of will hurt you the most."

This statement is tremendously powerful because it holds so much truth. Let me demonstrate how this applies to your resume. Writing a resume was likely not part of your education. They didn’t teach you any hard and fast rules or how to present yourself as employable once you entered the workforce. You probably think to yourself: A resume, one possibly two pages on nice white paper filled with work history and skills outlining your career thus far. Sounds simple enough, right? The answer is it's not. We live in a world where very little emphasis is put on preparing people to create this document, which should be their biggest personal marketing tool.

Without study on the subject and with all the varying bad advice on the web, it's something that we don't know how to recognize as bad for ourselves. The majority thinks they put down the positions held, the dates, and what the responsibilities were and send it out into the world hoping for the best. People job search on an average of 18 different online sites and just chalk up the lack of response to the black hole that is the online application system. This is not always the case and people are failing to look at themselves as part of the problem because they lack the understanding that their resume does not work for them.

As someone who evaluates resumes for a living, I can confidently say that most people are failing at doing this for themselves. The only commonality I ever see between resumes is that most people do not know how to present themselves in a way that they look qualified or like someone worth hiring. The similarities end there.

The 2015 CareerBuilder Candidate Behavior Study backs up this failure. They found the following stats:

·73% of employers say less than half of the candidates make it thru the initial screening process

·Candidates average a 78% rejection rate

·54% of employers say it is hard to find qualified candidates

With job growth averaging 45,000 per month in 2015, it is sad to hear people are still unemployed and employers stating they can’t find good candidates. How many times have you applied for a job knowing you had all the skills necessary to do it well and all the experience needed, only to never hear a peep about your application? Chances are, you didn’t present yourself in a way that made a hiring manager believe that too. You can't blame the system when other people are landing jobs every day.

A professional resume writer can take one look at your resume and know what is missing. They can take your document from mediocre to compelling. They have the understanding of the industry trends and best practices to give you the most optimal chance of landing your dream job. This is what they specialize in! The entire hiring system is meant to screen people out not screen people in. Never before has your resume played such an important part in your application process. Professional writers are engrossed in resumes on a daily basis and this gives them a unique vantage point that you will not have. They know exactly what you are up against and how to elevate you to get better results in the process.

You are quite accustomed to hiring professionals in many aspects of your life but scoff at doing it for your career. You could change the oil in your car yourself too, but I bet you hire an expert to do it. You want an expert to take care of that valuable asset. Is your career any less valuable? This is an investment in your career track, your potential earnings, promotions, and ultimately your happiness. If you landed a better job and got paid even 10% more this year, would this investment still seem too much?

Still not sure if it's worth the value? Let's take a look at what a resume writer actually does for the money that you spend...

Diagnostic review of your current resume. We evaluate it for weaknesses and how best to repair them. We identify where the failures lie and what is missing to get you through the door for your career.

Review and analysis of your Personal Brand. We learn about you, where you want to land professionally, your accomplishments, and work history. This helps us understand how to brand you for potential employers as well as how to frame your accomplishments to leave a lasting impact.

Analysis of the job descriptions you send us. We review the requirements and perform keyword studies to make sure your resume will pass ATS systems and get your resume in the hands of a hiring manager.

We do the bragging for you. We will write a compelling summary that highlights your unique qualities and cements you as a qualified candidate for the job. We write accomplishment-based bullets that identify your value rather than your duties. The content creation is the most critical component of any resume and the most common area people fail drastically!

We save you time! We take the guesswork out of it for you. We are always up on the latest industry trends and standards. Writing resumes is our profession. By hiring us, you don't have to spend the time studying up on how to write a resume, best formatting techniques, keyword strategy, language usage, work history gaps etc. Save that valuable time for something else and have the peace of mind that your resume is in good hands.

Professional objectivity. We are not attached to your career history in the same way you are. We can hone in on the important information and trim the fat off your resume. We bring a fresh perspective to the information you've been cultivating for years and package you in a way that is more enticing to employers. (This blog explains this more in depth).

Many of those items most likely never figured into the resume you wrote for yourself.

If this is still not enough to show you the merit, let’s look at hard numbers.

Say you are up for a $60,000 job. A $60,000 job comes out to about $1154 a week, gross. You hired a resume writer at $250. You land the job with the new resume. In one week, your $250 investment has provided an ROI of over 3.5 times your initial expense. For many, the resume costs them just a day or two of pay. It honestly pays for itself and is often tax deductible as part of your job search costs.

Here is a real-life case study from a client. Before hiring a resume writer, this person sent out 50 resumes and received no responses. After submitting a professionally tailored resume, this person sent out 12 resumes, received 8 interviews,was hired, and made $12,000 more than his previous position.

To put that shift into perspective for you, I can go back to the CareerBuilder stats. They found on average each posting only receives three phone interviews and three in person interviews. Not a lot when you think of the hundreds of applications they received. In addition, 60% of applications never receive a response of any kind. Having only changed their resume, this client went from the norm of no responses to a 67% positive response rate. I don’t know any frustrated jobseeker that wouldn’t like those results!

And if all of this still doesn't sway you to the fact that you need this service or that it's worthwhile, consider your overall happiness and well-being.

Do you dread going to work every day?

Are you watching the clock from 4:45 to 5 o'clock or even starting earlier?

Do you wish you were doing something else, but you're in a job just to make ends meet?

Do you know you're getting overlooked for promotions because you're not presenting yourself as somebody that gets things done or has contributed to the company?

Your salary, are you making what you should be? Are you missing out on opportunities to make more?

All of these things can be factored into your resume. More money, a better job opportunity, being happy at work, these things contribute to your overall well-being and happiness. People spend so much time working these days, shouldn't it be something that either you're well compensated for or very proud and happy to do every day? Why do you not see an investment in your career as valuable, when work has such a large impact on your overall life, health, and happiness?

Stop leaving your most important document to your best guess on what will work and let a professional hammer out a perfectly tailored resume that exemplifies you at your very best! You and your bank account won’t be sorry you did!